


On the long-term effects of half-smoked cigars; or, To make a man unkillable

by DanseDan



Category: Il buono il brutto il cattivo | The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Pre-Slash, SHITHEADS IN LOVE, vague nsfw mentions but not anything actually nsfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27861358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanseDan/pseuds/DanseDan
Summary: "we're all alone in the world, Blondie- I have you and you have me"or,  a hustler comes to grips with no longer lying.
Relationships: "Blondie" | The Man with No Name/Tuco Ramirez
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I rewatched GBU a while ago and just kind of went batshit at the monastery scene and everything after, and then I desperately wrote the summary and some incomprehensible notes, and then and then I totally forgot what I was planning on doing and wrote this based on that idea. Fun! Might actually add some post-canon at the end now that I think about it. god knows.

He'd heard a lot before, about men bring killed by their lovers- hadn't doubted the stories. Men killing men out of fear of the feeling. He knew white men and the laws they made to cover their own ass, ways to get around the shame of saying it, knew people and the world and knew firsthand himself that if love was part of life then death along came hand in hand.

He thought about those deaths on the way to the gold, remembered weddings and warm bodies, the rare few times women happened to get attached to him (his taste for danger never much source for comfort, considering the likelihood of having his own gun get pulled on him the nights he tried to get away) as well as the teasing platitudes of lesser lovers, mostly present of mutual convenience. His head still rang sometimes, from the interrogation at the prison camp, and it didn’t do much to assuage him from remembering the long, sweaty nights that had made up their previous acquaintanceship, Angel’s curious, almost mocking way of looking up at him- somehow still terrifying while taking it up the ass- his death-sure hands tracing the rope burns on his neck, his widening serpent’s smile, all more mild amusement than affection, but still so close to deadly.

He had nothing to fear now, though. Blondie didn't love him.

Any attempt at betrayal would be a fair fight, just as impersonal as leaving him stranded in the dessert before, something the gringo could wash his hands of then and there, in that moralizing way he had of killing. The hand of god, laying lazy on broad hips, a muscular, thick stomach gold and hairless in the firelight of the prairie, stuck sweaty to the leather gunbelt, warm from the day’s kill.

Never thought he’d envy desert hares- but he supposed there was a first for everything.

Just as clear as he remembered those first few honest words, weak words- “we're all alone in the world, Blondie- I have you and you have me”

Remembrance was just as well, too, on a night like this. Antsy with whiplash from too many false betrayals, out in the open and heading towards more gold than a single man could count. He could almost settle into the warmth and see it play out, distant, before his eyes.

As much as he’d resented those few honest years between childhood and becoming, they’d taught him the value of flattery. Much easier to bust a gun on some poor idiot when he thinks he’s dealing with a half-petrified kid, and barring foolishness outlaws still tended to skew somewhere between egomaniac and bloodshot redeemer, both of which were terribly susceptible to wheedling. Seeing as he’d pegged Blondie the latter once he was back on his feet and running con with him, he’d gainfully employed quite a bit of spontaneous praises and politeness to avoid stepping on his toes- of course, all thrown out the door once the fool bastard chose to betray him. Then back at square one with half a roadmap to a fortune and a burnt and bloody Blondie, he’d been gearing back up to that oversweetened kindness, so stuck on the panic of keeping him alive, keeping the uniform act up, that in the moment when the words slipped from his mouth it took a minute to discover they had caught him with his pants down, that he wasn’t lying.

He still doesn’t know how it happened- the flask of whiskey finally kicking in, the excitement of the fortune, panic at seeing his brother again, or perhaps simply the flaring warmth of the taller man’s frail, overheating body pressing lightly into him on the creaky bed. Probably the liquor, in retrospect, he drank too much for the little food he got, but he was blabbering the second his eyes met the gringo’s sunburnt face, yammering on somehow about relations like he’d never conned a soul in his whole life, bumbling and clumsy and feeling all the wrong impulses about where to look and what to say.

“when one is… ill, it’s good to have somebody close by… Friends, or relations.”

That had been the catch perhaps- his one mistake, ‘relations’, sitting as they were within his brother’s domain, the mantle he had failed to honorably undertake himself. Leading to all sorts of sentimental questions, the sickbed and the bathtubs forming childhood memories burnt into his mind.

“do… do you have parents, Blondie? A mother?”

And the look across his face, tired, scolding (he could almost hear the man’s usual exasperated sigh through eyes alone) did little to eliminate these conjured images. What if Blondie really was a bastard child of any thousand fathers? Someone with nobody to disappoint, no images like his, of a warm-handed, overweight woman in a patched-up dress, brushing back his hair, patting down his clothes. Of bare feet on the doorway side-by-side years later, grey-haired and half-senile. The pity pooling in his stomach made him sick- but he washed it away with the hum of the liquor. Tuco was a shameless man. He was a survivor. If a little pity for the pretty bastard crossed his mind, when he was sentimental and half-drunk, so be it, he was human, and it would only be a better help at playing at concern for him, cooing after it.

“no-one huh. Like me, Blondie, we’re all alone in the world”

He knows he should’ve remembered- he was in a church, goddammit- he should have remembered somewhere along that little pastoral nostalgia trip he had the lessons from that drunken swindling pastor from his neighborhood. That excuses are the tongue of the devil salty in your ear. And he could feel it in that brief pause- for all the infamy around its capabilities, he had a quick mind and he knew it- see that he had walked too close to shore, misjudged the distance to the point of hitting slippage. This wasn’t lying, drunken pity, it was desperate, and it had to end.

And end soon.

So he slips back into the act of playing bastard, cuts back on the sputtering and calms himself.

“In my place you would do the same thing- it’s all over for you now.”

And he wasn’t stupid- he knew Blondie wouldn’t buy all the talk about fatality and telling him the secret. But he was trying to believe it just the same, that it’d all be fine if he could just get rid of the damn bastard. Yeah, it would be fine and dandy, and he would be a rich man then- rich enough to drown out any soft little impulses coming up now, in this room, at this moment. So he slips into the hustle- weeping, pleading, cajoling- and hell, if he feels so drawn to the idiot’s bastard body, his idiotic sunburn-pouting lips, he’ll just as easily throw in a reason, daub some coffee on them, as a flattery. ‘Till every impulse and consideration could be reasonably about the gold, and what he’d do with it, a full and thorough distraction. And god bless Blondie, for being just enough of a bastard to remind him of it even in this weakened state, wash away the little bit of good favor at the front of his mind with his little trick with the coffee, his glib comment about having “a good friend nearby”.

And it was three weeks in the monastery then, as the stubborn bastard refusing to die, getting more and more demanding to the point where he had a good and easy run of it, playing at being some ugly sort of chambermaid. The tension finally lifting, Blondie too weak to be a threat and too strong to seriously try to wear down into speaking. So he kept himself as drunk as he found means to, talked a cheap and constant stream of empty threats, empty compliments and empty rosary-prayers. Blondie’s burns eventually got well enough that the favors were more of a joke or a trial than any necessity, that he could look at him right back again, sigh and scowl, pass him half-smoked cigarillos that Tuco’d insist on tossing immediately.

“Ey, I’m not an ashtray, Blondie.”

But then of course there had been Pablo, that last day, when he’d been sober for the road and getting antsy. Suddenly thrown, mourning his parents, parrying that weak defense- spouting bullshit about fear, and how he’d stayed before, about poverty. Trading blows, not able to look his brother proper in the face. He was all shook up, dread and restless at the pit of his stomach as he turned away.

And stopping in the entryway as Pablo let out a final plea, he could only think it smelled like cigarillo, the way that familiar scent somehow that made him feel lighter already only another cold stab in his throat that he’d rather ignore.

Now here they were, reunited and a pair again, whole once more after all those twists and turns, like heavy words he wanted to keep out of his mouth. The truth had long sunk deep into his gut and lodged itself in memories- since they’d been caught by the union soldiers, really, or perhaps even earlier, the moment he accepted Blondie’s sympathy for his obvious lies while heading off. Not that knowing the truth was better- hell, he caught himself thinking like a fool child, forgetting the agony of the prison camp, of his family, or the heat of the dessert, and focusing on idiocies like how Blondie’d smoked that half-cigar before him, held it between still-healing lips, and all the times before then that he’d been trying to pass on half-smoked cigars without a glance, like it was some sort of coded kindness and not the bastard trying to rile up his ego.

He, Tuco Ramírez, who knew he’d done a million times worse (and had the long, droning speeches of various lawmen to prove it), was so gone off that he was getting riled up at the thought of riding a horse with that stinking, idiotic, assless gringo, tasting the ghost of his mouth on the dying butts of pity-cigars. It was pathetic, and revolting, and god, he knew for sure he’d killed men over less than need.

A need that Blondie clearly didn’t share, by his constant indifference. Shit, least he could do is stand to look at him- all this pondering by firelight felt even more pathetic, when the man himself laid akimbo, peacefully asleep at a fair distance and turned away from him. The sliver of his profile visible above his shoulder pale, unguarded, like the milky-toned skin of his back rising and falling in the moonlight, pocked with scars. Even fully dressed, the slight rustle of his clothes, the suggestion of muscle underneath tight, faded blue jeans was a sight to see.

Tuco was a shameless man. He was a survivor. And soon he would be rich.

So if a little staring at the bastard assuaged the ache inside his gut, and a couple silent thrusts into his hand helped him to sleep, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t indulge.

After all, they were nearing the bridge tomorrow- not another day’s travel to the cemetery after that. He’d finally be getting rid of Blondie, and the need and desperation followed by him. He would once again be free.

(and if, as he settled to sleep, a little affection for the son of a bitch drove him to not plan on any betrayals, well, he could deal with that part later.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man. This was all written basically between today and yesterday because of Life Events making me Feel Like Shit and needing badly to project on cowboys. He's in love, he's stupid, and he's not sure what he's gonna do about it. Depending on how horrible the following week/s are porn comes soon 'cause I have an idea and know that I'll need it lolololololol time to hide in a corner

Another daylight, another series of unearned, quiet pities. At least he gets to drink- god bless the Yankees, too godless to care. (perhaps, something he should relate to, can't have got too good a reputation with the old man upstairs, by now, but can't shake the urge to keep throwing a bone. Prodigal son and all that). The northerners don't buy his lies, but give away their trust for free instead, and despite the lack of uniforms he's once again crossed lines and slipped into this white war. Too bad, he can’t bring himself to care now, knowing how easy it can be to slip out, and that the gold might make it easier.

He tells another truth. A stupid, dangerous one. He doesn't prove he gets a lie in return 'till later, but he can feel it. Tuco knows. He's got a sense for it, and he feels the cold rise up warm in the crooks of his bones, in the pit of his stomach. It might be the war-music, some lone bugle in the distance under the din of the standstill, too stupid to shut up this far into the march towards death, but he can’t stop the stirring. Something about the road’s changed Blondie- or maybe something about the men they’re dealing with now appeals more to his sensitivities- because he’s being too kind and too stuck in his good man act, making promises and tributes to the dead and dying left and right.

He doesn’t know why he let Blondie prod him into telling- maybe he didn’t expect that response, when he started complaining about his righteous quest to blow up some treasured bridge, save strange men’s lives for no good reason. Maybe it was a fondness for finally hearing some sort of interest and desire in the man, some small sign of humanity- he too, tries tricks, works men like this, with small, suggesting words. He doesn’t know why he gives in and tells him first- that fond of kindness gone all-too-far, that need to know if Blondie cares for him, the person, not just recipient of the secret, not just flesh-weight of insurance. They’re fool’s errands, the truth and the seeking both.

And he hates to tell. He fights with the truth, live and stewing in his mouth- god, like a frog. Like a bullfrog in his throat, like the stories he’d heard as a boy of the ten plagues of Egypt. Like the stories, he feels his stone-heart churning. He’s no pharaoh. It’s so hard to speak truth to those eyes- those blue eyes, those green eyes, those damned eyes. He’s sick in the back of his throat and he feels it. He’s aching all over- god, he’d jumped out of a train car to get to him, of course he’s aching- he feels his mouth open and close, like an idiot. He feels the ghost of a gunshot, a future- anyone would’ve done it. Angel would’ve done it, the second he’d heard it. But Blondie- you never know with him, with Blondie at the back end of the gun.

“-Sad Hill, now it’s your turn.”

And Blondie does nothing. He stops, he luxuriates- he takes out the cigarillo from his mouth to speak clearer, like a croak politician. He hides his light eyes and he lies. He lies an obvious lie, a stupid lie, a priest’s, but Tuco is stupid now, too (by fondness or contagion, who can tell) and all he can do is receive it, wade fast and away after Blondie and wait with his mind on the fortune.

Even after it all, cradling the false truth in his trembling mind, in those shattering and sudden-quiet moments after each explosion, Tuco wonders if he’s just another witness to Blondie’s new journey into the annals of heaven. He feels starved and feels insatiable. He feels filthy. He’s supposed to be shameless- he’s taken more from better men and lost no ounce of sleep for it. He feels nervy and warm and like he’s fucked up his line in a mass and someone’s snickering from the pews in the back-end corner. Like a bastard. He could do better- getting kicked around isn’t exactly his usual idea of a good time- and he’s supposed to be shameless. Is shameless, and he knows Blondie won’t lie once again, he won’t care to.

He takes his chances, then. 

He takes the horse.

And of course- but of course- it’s too late. He hits the gravestone before he can think of it, clears his mind of all things to dash in. No more Blondie, or Tuco. No more talking. Just the bark of the hound-dog and running, painful, tired running to the cemetery center, to the grave of his future of gold. He feels the thrill of it, yeah. Feels it warm and bright again- no Blondie, no talking, no problems. Just the want and the means to fulfill it, no matter the distance between them. and the graveyard is massive, but running? He can do running- best out of anyone, running. Forever and always. He runs like an animal, breathless and active and smiling. Runs ‘till his eyes blur over and burn in the musky sun. The sweat down his back, molting wood in his hands, dust under his fingernails- playing the idiot again, stick to what suits you. Just digging- don’t look at the signpost, just digging, desperate digging. On your hands and knees if need be. No need to think of how you know he’s lying, just digging.

Until he shows up. And there’s that not-so-quiet moment of consideration, ineloquent.

And then, of course, some showboating from Angel, just what they needed. He’s sick enough with one at a time, so who cares, he’ll dig while the gringos grandstand.

“if you shoot me you won’t see a cent of that money”

Of course. God, of course.

The fucker.

“why?”

Isn’t it obvious? Díos santo, son of a thousand bitches, what about the good deeds for your real kinsmen? How are scammers less than soldiers, when they kill just as many and kill quicker too?

Well… kill most quicker.

The bastard could afford to take the desert as a compliment. Know he was worth killing slowly.

“I’ll tell you why- ‘cause there’s nothin’ in there.”

A half-dressed skeleton. To think he has this much talent for playing the idiot. Still, God, the filthy body. If Blondie knew this man- he knew his grave, at least- he must’ve been as bad a friend to him as he was to Tuco. Maybe that rotting tombstone was his piece of charity- if Blondie wrote as pretty as he looked and acted half as sentimental as he thought he did.

He wonders if that charity’d extend to him. With death out of the question- would a burial suffice?

Not that he’d want it. Not his by his hand anyway. He picks up the shovel and picks a fight-

“you think I’d trust you?”

And Tuco’s quiet. Because Blondie has. He’s trusted him on his stupid sickbed in the monastery and trusted him with his back turned every cold and dusty night of camp. He’s trusted him with dynamite and carriage-rides when he knows well enough each could outdraw the other, with enough grit and luck and depending on the whims of saints- which Tuco has to trust he’s got more of in his corner, considering his luck and all the names he carries.

“200,000 dollars is a lot of money…”

And Tuco’s quiet. Because it’s not about the money. If it had been about the money he’d have done his share of waiting- what’s a week after a lifetime? Would’ve taken his fill of sweat- what’s a blind, fast nighttime fuck when you’re plumb poor and dead lonely? And then, after all of their adventures, only then his fill of blood. Quick, quiet, skillful. There’s a reason Angel Eyes was not a stranger to him- he knows how to handle a death. Knows when to talk and when to shoot. A cross and a spit and a prayer and goodbye Blondie. This was not about the money and he had to know it.

“we’re gonna have to earn it.”

Santo Cristo.

Angel’s staring straight, when he turns to him. He’s smart enough to have it figured out- the both of them, their reasons. Tuco wishes vaguely that they could’ve stayed friendly, at least enough to have a laugh at their poor partner’s saintly airs.

But laughter doesn’t come- rules do. A stone, a gun, three pairs of footsteps. He can’t help but look back and between them. Blondie’s got the face of a tortured prophet, wears his poncho like a cape, slick hands somehow delicate around the fabric, the stone and the cigar. Angel looks sick to his stomach, in the way fine men sometimes have of being insulted. He looks like at his worst- when he knew he was killing for nobody’s business, killing somebody too stupid to enjoy. Tuco can’t help but wonder if he looks like anything but ragged. He thinks of all the times he’s played with death- looks Angel in the eyes at last and knows they both remember the terms they left each other on, those years ago. His long attachment to that wasteful mistress, and Tuco’s own strange and eccentric form of twee regard for life. He draws his gun, still meeting gazes- they understand Blondie’s not going to shoot, that he needs the standoff, that they’re playing the villains in this moral tale. Angel Eyes is looking at his hands, his throat, as threatening as ever. It feels like a farewell, like a return to their long-dead and short-lived intimacy.

He starts to walk- all three start to walk. So much walking in one’s life and never any different when walking to one’s grave, that he knows from experience. The steps are heavy, labored, light. He sweats and breathes and feels he hears the bugles. Fears for his life and damns his love. Calls it love, for once. Allows it- if he’s dying, this time (and he might be dying, between the only two men who he knows well could bring him close to it) he has to do it right. With so many rehearsals, he’s got no excuses, no? He’s dying his way- as he lived- dying like a glutton.

They stand still, and he knows he’s got to live, knows neither of these men have shown a hesitance to kill, but chooses to forget himself. To let the swell of warmth pool in his stomach, sickly sweet, to breathe longer, heavy, to feel his heart beat hard. He drinks in the vision of Blondie, that stupid bastard, the last man on earth he’d ever hope to feel any attachment to, savors the appearance of his broad, stately shoulders and his soldier’s waist. The cool, collected gesture of his hands, long, strong and calloused. Strains to smell the cigarillo- he wishes he got one, with the ghost of the flavor of them in his mouth too faint to offer solace, his nerves shot. Wishes he could have a final smoke, or drink, or meal again. Wishes he could’ve had at least a final fuck (he’s not a usual sentimentalist, and figures now it’s far too late to learn), have kissed those pink-streaked aching lips and touched his own to the cockles of his skin, felt warmth and sweat and heard the heartbeat of that man of stone, have proved him human.

He thinks of all those tales of men who killed to run away from love and balks, now knowing killing was so much a declaration. So much ownership- to picture that body broken by his hand, even this cold and distant way, even with Angel Eyes as audience.

Well, perhaps not with his audience. He touches palm to fingers, itching for his gun.

And there’s one gunshot in place of three, but it isn’t his.

Angel still goes down- when it’s no longer so quiet that his heart thinks over the survival of his spirit, he notes that something’s wrong with his gun. Opening the cylinder- no bullets.

Blondie is looking at him, but his gun is trained on Angel Eyes even as he draws back the hammer again.

A second shot puts Angel in his grave, but likely not among his namesake.

A third one seals the deal. Or his intent at least.

A fourth one feels like overkill.

Blondie is coming towards him, gun tight on his thigh, and it’s not until he slightly smiles that Tuco can be sure that he won’t kill him.

“ You pig… You wanna get me killed- when did you unload it?”

“…last night.”

So much for his affection, then.

“ In this world, there are two types of people my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”

It’s almost amicable then- a peaceful explanation, no need to draw the gun on him. Soon enough he’s got eight heavy bags of gold out of the coffin.

And then he sees the noose.

“you’re joking Blondie… You wouldn’t play a joke on me like that…”

“it’s no joke, it’s a rope, Tuco.” 

The son of a bitch, this again- walls on walls on walls. Was this how he got off, the rope? He himself feels ashamed at the effect of the brief brush of Blondie’s hands working the knots around his wrists. He’s sick of this. One pull on the rope and his thin breath is half-gone, what a tender way to kill, traditional. Blondie looks almost expectant, before not looking like much, in the middle distance. That pig bastard, still indecisive, like he doesn’t know whether to kill him, leave him screaming out that gifted name, or leave him shot down in the dust with his hands tied.

Plenty of options, clearly.

He’s sore, soaked through with sweat and stuck with dust, barely keeping together. At least with his half of the gold, at least with the knowledge that not quite so far and away were the union barracks, that Angel Eyes lied cooling and helpless in an open grave, with a loaded gun that hadn’t seemed too shabby.

With the open invitation of that played-at death. Those bullets and that smile.

Of that one unguarded moment in the standoff, when Tuco swore he saw his eyes melt into something almost-human, knowing he had caused that. Him, Tuco Ramirez, rat, shameless bastard that he was. That he had caused that and it had made him unkillable, somehow placed him above the plane of belonging and into a position of necessity. Of the expectant look before riding away, like he was being tasked with searching and survival- like it was the barest favor he could do the man.

If this was love- god save him- he would follow it to death.

The only question what to whose.


	3. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh boy! It's not quite what I expected of it (spoiler alert- no real porn in this one, whoops.) but I felt the need to finish this tonight. I'm pretty happy with it.

When he forced his way into Blondie’s hotel room and dropped the noose at his feet, Blondie didn’t do anything. His colt lay disassembled on a side-table, and he stood wet and naked in the golden light of the fireplace, staring down at him. It was a quiet midnight, and the town was one of the many already out of the war. No guns, no dogs, no cannon fire- no tricks of fate to save him this time around. Just the two of them and the silent night, the expanse of the flat endless sky of the desert outside the glass of the single window stretching on for miles and miles of nothing.

Tuco’s got a gun in his hands (a loaded gun, this time). And his desperation makes him hungry, makes him almost perfectly recall the feeling of the noose around his neck, the fear of losing balance, falling.

But Blondie’s made him fall so many times already, hasn’t he?

The warm, humid heat of the room is thick and heavy, so far from the usual desert dryness they inhabit. It makes everything feel hazy, dreamlike- why would those arid concerns matter in this room, when not even the air they breathe is similar? Why should he worry, about the consequences tomorrow might bring, about the total absence of any urge to hurt the taller man, about the many vocal urges to do otherwise?

He keeps the gun drawn, steps softly forward. Blondie does enough watching and waiting for the both of them already, he thinks, and he’s been walking through the desert for a month now. Only natural to walk towards water- towards that towering form still standing, unanswering. The man looking down and tracking him, staring at the gun (at least, looking down around there- his blue-green eyes unfocused, glazing over) but telling nothing in his glance. Walls back up again- but in this room, in this haze of hunger, who cares? Wells have got walls, but that won’t stop him from drinking. And god, with his dry throat- why demand a cause for such clear waters?

Soon they’re only inches apart, Blondie holding nothing but the thin, ratty towel slung around his hip, and Tuco softly touching the gun to the soft flesh of his belly, stretched surprisingly thin for a rich man. Not even a fortune could rip this man from his denials- a saint’s soul in the body of a common whore, a heretic’s head on his shoulders.

But none of that matters now. Not here, so close, where he can feel the heat at its best, the warm hugging heat of Blondie’s body, and of the water that had washed it.

And it’s easy.

It’s easy to slip down the gun, drag the towel down with it. It’s easy to push Blondie back onto the bed, still-made and slightly chilling, gun up into his sternum starting goosebumps on a pale expanse of downy skin. It’s easy to close his eyes and bring his face to Blondie’s skin, to kiss away the water laying on it, make him filthy with his spit and sweat and sallow, quickening breath. To forget himself, and Blondie, and the world and everything but kissing, but the skin below his lips, everything but the next small drop of tepid water, like a lifeblood slowly sunken into. It’s easy to disappear and just forget he ever lived a world without this fire in his skin, without the muffled, throaty sounds of Blondie from above him, working to be restrained.

And in this haze it’s easy to forget he ever felt the need for those excuses. That he ever fooled himself into thinking that without Blondie by his side, and with the gold, they would go away and settle in the dust of Sad Hill, just another ghost story, a fleeting event of animal magnetism. Here, in the constantly duplicitous embrace of fire and freezing metal, stuck between the legs of his worst enemy and dearest friend, Tuco could see his impulses were anything but soft. Touching him, hearing him, was hard, was hurtful. Knowing that he knew, that they would share the thought together, share the need, the common burden of humanity. That no matter how much of a bastard Blondie was, he was his bastard, and that no matter what he did, that it was all set down and wouldn’t ever really leave him even if he left the man behind. Stuck together like a cattle-brand to burning beef, until the grave, until they both got eaten up by the hungry devil chasing them.

(and somewhere, there’s a ghostly whisper wet inside his partner’s ear. And he would say it better- he would say it with already-dying words, say it _Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas_ )

But as it stands, neither of them thinks to say it.

They don’t need to- it’s easy for now. It’s only melding bodies in some dream of an oasis.

And tomorrow it’s still easy, only a mild hangover and an itching reason to skip town.

And after that it’s easy, because it’s still them. It’s still that pair of idiots, thrice-damned and never satiated, holding one unguarded moment in between them that has proved worth more than half a million buried fortunes.

It’s easy to let the gun hit the floor. To let their lips meet, after all this watching, waiting. To let the blonde’s strong arms, slow, wrap around him, drag him towards the blankets, rid him of every damn last stitch of clothes that’s on his body. To let go until they wrap around each other, bare and panting, and forget about the world outside the single, foggy window of the humid room, to forget both life and death, the saints and angels that had pushed them through it, and the devil waiting in the wings.

And it was easy, for once, in between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> betcha didn't expect angel eyes in this one! Neither did I, actually, he just kinda... manhandled his way into it because he knew he'd have a snappier phrase than Tuco. It's from Ovid, and it means "And now the work is done, that Jupiter’s anger, fire or sword cannot erase, nor the gnawing tooth of time".
> 
> ...I learned it from an FNV porno I read on a whim. 've got great reading habits, clearly.


End file.
